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Fish Soup

A broth made from eels, soles, or plaice simmered with onions, herbs, and spices, thickened with butter and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Fish Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the soup base

  1. Score and fry the onions in butter in a stewpan.

  2. Cut the fish into pieces, keeping the prime middle part for frying.

  3. Add the fish pieces to the butter and onions; shake over the fire for a few minutes.

  4. Add boiling water and cover. When it boils, skim carefully.

  5. Add parsley, savory, lemon thyme, black pepper, and allspice.

  6. Let it boil gently for two hours, then strain the soup.

Thicken and finish

  1. In a clean stewpan, thicken the soup with butter rubbed in flour.

  2. Fry the middle pieces of fish cut into about 2-inch pieces.

  3. Ten minutes before serving, add the fried fish to the soup along with fish forcemeat balls.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Thyme + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,077 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Lemon + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,973 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  5. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Onions
Frying them in butter builds a sweet, savory aroma base for the soup.
Eels, soles, or plaice
Provide the main fish flavor and body to the broth as they simmer.
Butter
Carries flavor during frying and, rubbed with flour, thickens the soup.
Flour
Combined with butter, it thickens the strained soup to a fuller texture.

The step that matters

Skimming after the water boils. Skimming removes foam and impurities that would otherwise cloud the broth and muddy its flavor during the long simmer.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, parsley, lemon, thyme, pepper, allspice, flour):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, parsley, lemon, thyme, pepper, allspice, flour. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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